The Cathedral of Santa Maria Del Fiore

The Marble Cupola Above the Dome

     The cathedral in Florence is everything it was said to be and more.  The city is small enough and walkable enough and Il Duomo, is large enough that its presence dominates everything.  It, and the campanile by it, is so big and every facet of its immensity covered with so much detail that it is impossible to take it all in as one integrated object, as one building.

     We marveled at the outside and toured the inside.  The altars get lost in the space, the floors are intricately designed marble, the ceiling of the dome is a fresco of heaven and hell.  Although very much the architectural style of a Catholic church, it has a secular feel.  People are not there to be close to God, they are there as tourists, as we were, to gawk at the feats of renaissance man.  The walls are lined with gospel scenes and saints but also with frescoes and murals and coats of arms devoted to the wealthy merchants who built the cathedral as a mark of their own success and standing amongst the city states of Italy and the rest of Europe. 

     I have to give credit to the men who built it, not just to the designers and the financiers but to the masons, carpenters, wagoneers, metalsmiths, laborers, because I know what it is to execute the design of another, what it is to work daily in all kinds of weather at repetitive, difficult, physical tasks, to solve mechanical problems as they arise, to put your hands to the blocks of stone, to smell the mortar and hear men admonishing, encouraging, cursing one another as the building goes up.  I know what it is to be totally absorbed in the completion of a mechanical task, to craft it with your hands to an ideal cradled in your mind.  I wanted to know how they did it.

     The highlight for me was the climb to the top of the dome.  You start by going up a circular stone stairway for, (here I am guessing at heights and dimensions), several hundred feet to emerge at the edge of an octagonal drum on which the dome itself is built.  From this height you can look down into the main part of the cathedral to see tourists, already small and distant  and you can look up at the ceiling inside the dome to see high above the opening to the cupola, itself the size of a small building. 

     From here you climb inside the double layered dome up another stairway where you can see some of the internal structure.  Most of the structure is buried in the mass of masonry under your feet.  Your head brushes against the outer dome and occasionally you pass a small window looking out on Florence.  Each time you are a little further from the ground.  At the top you climb out onto the base of the cupola.  You cannot go inside the cupola which opens downward into the church ,just walk around it on the edge of the roof.  At the very top there is an eight foot diameter brass ball which is big enough to stand inside of but actually gets lost in the enormity of everything else.  

Montepertuso

     

     We woke up in our house high above Positano to another beautiful day.  We went to the café Il Pertuso for coffee and then took the bus into town,  In town there were many tourists, many giftshops, yachts and one navy patrol ship in the harbor.  I learned some new italian words; moglie, spiaggia.   I had my first look at a newspaper since we left.  There was another shooting, this time of 5 police officers keeping watch on a parade of protesters.

     

     Another hot, hair-raising ride back to Monte Pertuso from the center.  We ate again at the local   restaurant near the apartment.  It was La Festa de la Madonna, church bells rang and fireworks went off.  They were shot from the cliff side at 3 locations above us and exploded high over our heads where we were eating.  The flashes lit the face of the mountain and the white stone mixed with the red green and  blue of the fireworks as part of the display.

     

     The next day I climbed up to the hole in the mountainside that gives Monte Pertuso its name and saw the remnants of the rocket launchers.  I had climbed a long flight of stone stairs through terraced gardens to a well-worn forest trail until I came out at the puncture in the mountain.  From there, there was a rusted steel ladder that climbed to the top of the needle-eye.  I thought that might be the very top, but later when I looked at the entire mountain from below, I saw that it was just the beginning of the mountain which kept ascending far beyond that.

Firenze

We arrived in Florence in the afternoon and took a taxi from the train station to our Airbnb apartment.  Our hostess who arrived on a motor scooter about ten minutes after we did was named Monica.  She took me up to the fourth floor of the building where there was a small but clean and modern apartment looking out on the building across the narrow cobblestone street.  Pam had walked up to a little store and returned with the fixings for mozzarella salad.  We called out the window for her to come up.

 

      Florence was the one city I wanted to see having read the story of the building of the cathedral  Brunelleschi’s Dome  by Ross King.  The streets are narrow,  paved with basalt stones and open into spectacular piazzas, each one with architecture and art you couldn’t dream existed.  Cars are banned or limited throughout most of the city.  There are small family owned grocery stores and little restaurants in every conceivable corner of the city.   There are fantastic, enormous, intricately carved doors everywhere as if each local renaissance merchant had to outdo the other with the size of his entry door and its knockers.

Venezia

     We arrived in Venice on Trenitalia.  Our instructions from our airbnb host were to take the water bus to San Marco square.  Of course, like any American, I know what Venice is, but not really.  I realize this when I see it.  It has become more of a tourist attraction now than a city, but the depth of history here is evident at every turn.  Piazza San Marco, I thought was just another piazza.  As I struggled across it with our suit cases in tow, chasing the fast walking host and my wife, I realize that this is no ordinary piazza, even by Italian standards. 

     I remember reading once that Venice was founded by  Romans fleeing the advancing armies of Attila the Hun in the fifth century.  I knew it was sinking and that it was built in the water, and that there were gondolas.  I did not know that it breaths power and wealth. Its glory is that of another age, but it still stands.  It could be Disney World, but it is not.  It was not built to be a tourist attraction.  It was for centuries the heart of a dynamic creative and prosperous economy and society. 

     

We only planned one night in Venice.  Our main destination was Florence.  We arrived late in the day and checked in just after dark.  There were boats and gondolas just outside the windows.  Trash, we were told was picked up in the morning by a boat.  And we were told by our host that in a real high tide the first floor would fill up with water, at least up to small internal dams just inside the doors. 

     

We went out to find a place to eat knowing nothing about where we were, except we knew how to find our way back to Saint Mark’s square.  We found an osteria and The food was good and we sat for a while and had a bottle of wine.  The head waiter talked to us for a while.  He was Philipino but spoke English, Italian, Spanish, French and some German, as well as Tagalog. We had heard him easily slipping into the language of whatever table he was working on.  He told us he owned land in the Philippines and supported most of his family at home.  He planned to retire there someday. 

     

     The next day we had an outdoor breakfast in Saint Mark’s square and marveled at the architecture.  About midday we caught the train to Firenze.  It is interesting pulling out of the dense and ancient city of Venice, crossing over water for a ways and seeing the industry and shipping spread out over the wide Adriatic coast, with all of Europe to the immediate north and all of Italy to south.